For two years the family was split between Houston and Saigon, and talked to each other on cassette tapes posted halfway round the world. Thirty-one of them survive.
The story
“Letters took months and said nothing. So Ba bought a tape recorder and we'd sit round it and each say something — what we ate, what school was like. Mother sent tapes back. We sent our voices because the letters took too long.”
How it came down to us
Linh was eleven and remembers recording her part. Her son Kevin found the tapes in 2019 and had them copied before he wrote this down.
What people disagree about
Whether there were thirty-one tapes or thirty-four. Three are missing, or never existed.